Ordinary/Extraordinary: narratives, politics, history

The artpolitics of May
Stevens, as ‘the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life
to come’ – identified by Jacques Rancière as a kind of ‘aesthetic anticipation of the future’.

This article is part of an occasional
series on ‘The Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest,’ the subject of a
one-day workshop held at the University of Warwick this September. Democracy,
since it does not function through command or coercion, requires instead a
constant renewal of sets of symbols - symbols which appeal to people and instil
in them a sense of belonging and identification. Increasing disenchantment and
disillusion with the state, with political institutions, their practices and
performance, makes it more important to explore the place of this
aestheticisation of political language, the aesthetics of protest as well as of
power.

I am looking into the life
and art
of May
Stevens, an American working class artist, feminist and committed political
activist. Stevens was born in Dorchester MA in 1924 and grew up in Quincy. She
studied art at the Massachusetts Art School in Boston and later on in the Académie Julian in Paris, where she lived for 3 years
(1948-1951) with her husband just after the second World War. On returning to New
York, she became actively involved in the social movements of the turbulent
60s, fighting against racism, imperialism, war and sexism. It was through these
movements that she came of age as an artist. Her art and politics have been
inextricably interwoven.

Her work actually
creates a kind of möbius strip with her politics, you are never sure which is
the inside or outside. However if we were to create a chronology of what I will
call Steven’s artpolitics, her early ‘Big
Daddy Series’ expressed her involvement in the civil rights movement and
the anti-Vietnam war protests. The dominant figure of this series is her
patriotic working class father, depicted as both powerful—draped in the
American flag, or impersonated as Holly Trinidad—and impotent—he is after all,
a paper doll. We have in this early work the emergence of a motif of couplets,
dualisms and antitheses that will recur in her work, particularly with the Ordinary/Extraordinary series. There are two other themes in
her ‘Big Daddy Series’ work to note: first, the mingling of the personal and
the political; it is her daddy after all, whose caricature she draws, as a
patriarchal symbol of nationalism, religiosity, patriotism, oppression and
violence, and second an early intersectional approach to gender issues that
went through her artwork and politics like a red thread.

Indeed Stevens became
actively involved in several women’s groups and these activities ended up in
two important interventions: the establishment of an art school, The Feminist
Art Institute, and the publication of
the feminist journal Heresies:
a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Her active involvement in the women’s movement, notwithstanding,
Stevens was from the beginning sceptical of its essentialist trends. As she put
it in a series of conversations with Patricial Hills in 2005:

“Schapiro had been out in California working
with Judy Chicago, and the two of them were developing a theory that women’s
work, if it’s truly women’s work has round or oval forms in it, which had been
suppressed in the male art world. But I’m thinking I don’t like round forms
necessarily… I was furious and I thought, I don’t want these women putting me
in a bind, telling me what to do. Men were telling us what to do. Are women also
going to tell us what to do?”

Stevens, by contrast, would highlight the fact
that social class and race were part and parcel of women’s oppression in ways
that were often subtle and barely discernible. In this light, in 1982 she
invited the black artist Vivian Browne to join Heresies and together they edited a special issue on race, called Racism is
the Issue. Stevens’ feminist politics are most starkly expressed in her
series of [counter] historical paintings, as her famous Soho Women
Artists (1978),Mystery and
Politics(1978) and Artemisia
(1979). This was a project of
re-imagining women as historical subjects through an intervention in the high
genre of historical paintings, which was initiated by The Artist’s studio, after Courbet (1974).

In following these trails of Stevens’ artwork, we reach the 80s,
the decade marked by her interest in Rosa Luxemburg as depicted in the Ordinary/Extraordinary
Series:

“Ordinary.
Extraordinary. A collage
of words and images of Rosa Luxemburg, Polish/German revolutionary leader and
theoretician, murder victim (1871-1919), juxtaposed with images and words of
Alice Stevens (born 1895) housewife, mother, washer and ironer, inmate of
hospitals and nursing homes. A filmic sequence of darks and lights moving
through close-up to long-view and back. Oblique. Direct. Fragments of Rosa’s
thought from intimate notes sent from prison to her comrade and lover, Leo
Jogiches, and to her friends; from agit-prop published in Die Rote Fächne; and from her serious scientific writings. Images
from her girlhood, her middle life, and the final photograph of her murdered
head. Alice’s words from the memory of and letters to her daughter. An artist’s
book examining and documenting the mark of a political woman whose life would
otherwise be unmarked. Ordinary. Extraordinary."

I was quite moved when I first read this powerful blurb from May
Steven’s Artist’s Book, which
appeared in 1980 in the process of the artist’s long preoccupation with Rosa
Luxemburg that lasted for over ten years (1977-1991) and again returned as a
theme in her work in 2001. Ordinary/Extraordinary
is a poetic way of bringing two very different women together: the artist’s
mother and a celebrated political theorist and activist. However as Stevens has
remarked in her conversation with Hills, Ordinary/Extraordinary
should not be taken as a dualistic opposition between the two women,
configuring her mother Alice Stevens as ‘ordinary’ and Rosa Luxemburg as
‘extraordinary’:

“It was important to me
that people realize that both words, ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’, referred
to both women. I wanted to make Alice Stevens understood as a woman of a
certain character, who was quite unique and impressive in her own way. Rosa
Luxemburg, the brilliant theoretician was also a very ordinary human being. I
worked with those ideas.”

Both women were for Stevens simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, a
thought whose philosophical line can be traced back to Hannah Arendt’s argument
about the uniqueness of the human condition, the importance of ‘who’ one is, as
juxtaposed to the inevitable and politically dangerous reduction of ‘what’ one
is, that has historically fuelled totalitarian classifications and in turn
resulted in gross human rights violations. (Arendt, 1985) In this light, narratives are
particularly instrumental in revealing the ‘who’ and what the artist’s book in
the Ordinary/Extraordinary series
creates, is an assemblage of visual and textual narratives revealing the
unrepeatable uniqueness of human beings:

“The text in the book consisted
of extracts from Rosa Luxemburg’s letters and a few lines from her political
writings, and the text for Alice was also lines from letters she wrote and
postcards she wrote to me, plus a tissue of narrative that was necessary
because I didn’t have rich written material from my mother.”

Epistolary narratives and the force of human communication through
writing thus become important compositional elements of the Ordinary/Extraordinary series. Having read many articles from exhibition catalogues of the Ordinary/Extraordinary series I was
intrigued by the way the use of letters in the texts of the collages and the
artist’s book was of course mentioned, but never really commented, analysed or
discussed. Although art critics have not analysed the use of letters in the Ordinary/Extraordinary series, in her
recorded conversations with Patricia Hills, Stevens has referred extensively to
how she was drawn to Rosa Luxemburg by reading her correspondence to her lover Leo
Jogiches.

Luxemburg’s letters seem to have triggered the very ambiguity of
the Ordinary/Extraordinary
distinction that Stevens was playing with in the artist’s book and the
subsequent art series: Rosa Luxemburg and Alice Stevens as both ordinary and
extraordinary women, exposing themselves through their epistolary fragments as
unique and unrepeatable, but also vulnerable, relational and dependent on
significant others.

Although
written ‘to the moment’, as all letters are, in crystallising the moment and
spirit of its creation, the letter intervenes in our perception of linear time
and finite life and shows that the force of human life, if rendered into a
story, transcends the limitations of the life-span and enters the discourse of
history, which ‘ultimately becomes ‘the storybook of mankind with many actors
and speakers and yet without any tangible author’ (Arendt, 1998, 184). Not only
do individual human lives enter the discourse of history, Arendt argues, but
actually their life stories are creating conditions of possibility for history
itself: ‘That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be
told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical
condition of history, the great story without beginning and end.

Stevens was particularly preoccupied with this idea of the
unfinished story, forcefully and dramatically encapsulated in the famous ending
line from Luxemburg’s last known piece of writing, Order
Prevails in Berlin, “I was, I am, I shall be!” has become for Stevens
the phrase that dominates Voices—herpainting of Luxemburg’s funeral—thus transformingher death from an end to an event creating possibilities for new
beginnings.

Steven’s
portrayal of Luxemburg’s death as an unfinished story, foregrounds three
interrelated themes in her approach to life and art: the incessant cycle of
life and death, the importance of history painting and the salience of new
beginnings, that is also fundamental in Arendt’s philosophy: ‘the fact that man is capable of action means
that the unexpected can be expected from him, that [he] is able to perform what
is infinitely improbable.’ (1998, 178)
A different conceptualization of time runs through these three themes
highlighted above. As Stevens has noted :

“One of the things that interests me a great
deal is simply the idea of time—the approaches to time and the uses of time.
You spoke about my showing Alice, my mother and Rosa Luxemburg at different
periods in their lives, and I think one of the most interesting things that
I’ve tried to work with is crossing time—by using women of different times and
showing their commonalities.”

In doing
this, Stevens creates ‘visual biographies’ and in presenting different women of
different times’, it is not just ‘significant’ events that her artwork captures
and recasts. Luxemburg’s figure, her political writings, her well-known
portraits and her eloquent letters, are repetitively connected to and
juxtaposed with Alice Steven’s postcards, family photographs, reflections of
her daughter and reminiscences of conversations with her, but mostly with her
silences:

“Sometimes she held me, rocked me. But she had no words to give.
What she wanted to say became too big to be sayable. And the habit of not
speaking too fixed. Or, as she said, much later: too big to put your tongue
around … They put her away in a place for people who can’t speak, or speak in
tongues. After many years she stopped being angry … She had gained the ability
to speak, but lost a life to speak of …”

In this
light, the Ordinary/Extraordinary series
creates a very specific version of the grand genre of History Painting, to
which of course women artists have had limited access. Lisa Tickner has suggested that ‘it is possible to argue
for Ordinary/Extraordinary as a kind
of history painting transposed to the modern vernacular’, while Stevens has
included Ordinary/Extraordinary ‘in my
‘history paintings’ [wherein] official versions of history are deconstructed in
favour of hearing silenced voices and unrecorded lives.’

Disrupting the
distribution of the sensible

In presenting three phases of Stevens’ artpolitics I have traced five
strands of aesthetic interventions that clearly mingle and overlap throughout
her work:

Creating assemblages of visual images, stories and words

Using epistolary texts as signs that surprise and
wound the viewer, rather than as captions or illustrations, the letter as
‘punctum’ in Barthes’ conceptual vocabulary

Working on the interface of paintings and photographs

Creating visual biographies of parallel lives

Visualising
temporality in the form of series of repetitions and small differences

Stevens’ artistic practices work as what I want to call, anti-rhythms in the distribution of the
sensible. I draw here of course on Jacques Rancière’s notion: ‘I
call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense
perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common
and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within
it.’ The ‘distribution of the sensible’ is therefore a system where inclusion
and exclusion work hand in hand - defining the grounds, subjects and implicit
laws of certain communities of practice and thought. It has to be noted here
that the ‘sensible’ should not be understood as something that makes sense, but
as something that can be perceived by the senses, ‘what is visible and audible
as well as what can be said, thought, made or done’. As Rancière suggests, ‘the
distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to
the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this
activity is performed.’ This is the point where he rigorously argues that
‘there is “an aesthetics” at the core of politics’.

Having intervened in
the aesthetics of the distribution of the sensible, Stevens’ practices have
sided with what Rancière has identified as the crucial link between ‘the
“aesthetic” avant-garde and the “political” avant-garde: ‘the invention of
sensible forms and material structures for a life to come’, a kind of ‘aesthetic anticipation of the future’.
Art as
critique is therefore extended to politics, art and politics becoming
constitutive of each other, artpolitics as I have argued.

Maria
Tamboukou is
Professor of Feminist Studies at the University
of East London, UK the journal Gender and Education. Her research
activity is in the areas of critical feminisms, auto/biographical narratives
and Foucauldian and Deleuzian analytics. Writing feminist genealogies is the
central focus of her work.

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